Dual booting Mandrake and SuSE
 

I got Mandrake 9.2 and SuSE 9, and would like to install both of them on my spare PC to see which one I preffer.

The PC has two 6 gig hard drives in it, and Ive already installed Mandrake onto one of them. When I install SuSE onto the other, is there anything I will need to do? Or can I just install it normally, and then when the PC boots I can just select which distro to boot.

Also, wont SuSE install a bootloader when I install it. Will this conflict with the Mandrake bootloader? The bootloader being used by Mandrake at the moment is LILO.

I'm not sure about lilo, I use grub and have Red Hat, Suse 8.2 and 9 as wel as winme.

I installed windows, then RedHat and last the Suse distro's.

They install nice in the partition I choosed, but my LINUX entries in the Grub menu-list where gone(selecting windows was possible). They were however still present on the partitions, so I edited the last menu file and every thing works fine.

CB

So I should be able to just install SuSE on the other hard drive, and I will be able to boot into it from the bootup menu?

Yes that's right. After the installation you can only boot to windows (if you have that) and suse. You can even install it in an extended partition if you want.

Next you mount your mandrake drive in suse, so you can see the menu.lst file in the grub directory.

Than you go to /boot/grub and correct the file menu.lst with the entries
you can find in your mandrake drive.

CB

Okay, I think I get what you mean. I will give it a try.

I've got an idea that if you've already installed the mandrake on one disc and made it bootable, then if you install the suse on the other and make that bootable as well, it will overwrite the lilo that you had installed with the mandrake.

I have experienced a similar problem (well I have it again now, but that's a different story), Mine is a triple boot system with XP, mandrake 9.1 and debian/knoppix 3.3 (hard disc install).

I can have windows and mandrake bootable with lilo, or windows and debian/knoppix bootable, but if I want all three, then I have to manually edit the lilo.conf so lilo see's the two linux distro's.

What you could do until you get it sorted is to make a boot floppy for one of the distro's so if lilo doesn't see the other distro to start with, you can still boot into it with the floppy.

That should at least, get you up and running until you work out what you need to put into the lilo.conf manually to get both distro's booting from the hard drive.

Just a thought

regards

John

And just in case, my /etc/lilo.con looks like this

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
vga=normal
default="XP"
keytable=/boot/uk.klt
prompt
nowarn
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="Mandrake"
root=/dev/hda3
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="quiet devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi acpi=off"
vga=788
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux-nonfb"
root=/dev/hda3
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi acpi=off"
read-only
image=/Knoppix/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.22-xfs
label="Knoppix"
root=/dev/hda4
#initrd=/Knoppix/boot/initrd.gz
append="devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi acpi=off"
vga=791
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="failsafe"
root=/dev/hda3
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="failsafe devfs=nomount hdc=ide-scsi acpi=off"
read-only
other=/dev/hda1
label="XP"
table=/dev/hda
other=/dev/fd0
label="floppy"
unsafe

Obviously, you won't have the windows entries, but it should give you some idea of what you will probably have to put into your lilo.conf manually i.e. the two similar, but different entries to get it to boot from the hard drive with both OS's - don't forget to run lilo -v in a terminal if you alter your lilo.conf then if there's any errors, they should show up and enable someone (not me, I'm too stupid), too point you in the right direction.

regards

John

Thanks for the help.

The only thing is that I dont have a floppy drive installed in the machine. Guess I will have to put one in for the time being to do what you said.

If you're anything like me HitmanIP7, then after a while of booting it from floppy, it will piss you off and you will end up looking into what you actually need to include in your lilo.conf to make both distro's bootable.

Oh, and while you're at it, surf here and follow the links to the mirror's for knoppix and download that, burn it to a cd and give that a try.

It should run directly from the cd without installing anything on your hard drive (that's unless you then follow the links to the knoppix forums and check out how to install it to your hard drive, and as I've tried knoppix, which I still have as a second distro, it's almost as easy to install to hdd, as installing mandrake. Whereas if you wanted to try "proper" debian, that's a different "cup of tea" - in fact, absolute f****r is the phrase that comes to mind).

Or, there's always gentoo, which a fair number of the "uber geeks" at my LUG use. The admit that it's another fucker to install, but seem to be of the view that it's a real "power user" distro.

I use mandrake, but the first distro I tried, was SuSE 8, and compared to mandrake (and from a very novice point of view) I felt that it had quite a, well, for lack of a better descriptive, "German" feel to it. Sorry, that doesn't really help much, but the mandrake felt more straight forward, and user friendly for a first timer. Which seems strange as I was probably just getting used to the default graphic interface - but I still think that mandrake "feels" more friendly, even though both are rpm based distro's.

regards

John

Funny you should say that, because I thought exactly the same thing. There seems to be something about Mandrake which I really like. Ive also tried Red Hat 8.0, and there was something about it which I didn't like.

I thought Id install both just to give SuSE another try, and spend a bit more time using it.

I just have to try and find sometime to install SuSE now. One thing I liked about Mandrake was that it installed really quickly (only like 30 mins), where as SuSE (when I installed it originally) took nearer an hour to install.